intraspace: the review lounge

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

the story of england

the story of england, by tom beaumont james

just so that i can’t be pegged down by my review of the miles book, here is something completely different - a history of england. being of english descent myself, and always interested to hear what went on in that country, i wanted to get a book like this to gain a kind of background knowledge of england’s history. when i say ‘a book like this’ - i mean a book of less than 400 pages.


the problems with that are immediately obvious - our author (whom we shall simply refer to as ‘tom’) has had to leave a lot out, hasn’t filled in areas which might have been interesting, glossed over things, and assumed that we know things that we don’t.

not that there isn’t anything interesting in the book (there is) but tom is obviously a bit of a fan of archeology, and he wastes space talking about the history of that science, when he could have been talking about some of the more fascinating things that that science has found
out.

nonetheless, this book did give me a bit of narrative framework on which to hang the things i already knew about england, writing and history. so it was worth reading and kept me pretty engrossed.

gladometer ('how glad am i that i read it?') rating: reasonably glad.

on the headphones: ‘hey son (flash harry remix)’ by the black seeds, from the album ‘pushed’ (not from england by the way). www.theblackseeds.com

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